New Product Hunt of the Beverage Giant Presented a Reproducible Innovation Pattern

Early this year, a well-known international beverage giant launched a new series of sugar-free tea products, and had achieved a break-through performance in this throat-cutting competition of tea drink category, ranking category first in CVS channel according to Nielsen retail data.

As a world leading beverage brand, how it can continuously innovate and launch new products successfully while safeguarding its core competitiveness? What implications it can bring out for similar brands with high market penetration and major presence in offline channel?

No matter in highly competitive beverage market, or in other red-sea categories with high penetration rate, the top and mature brands are facing with shared pain points in innovation: New brands are emerging, and products which don’t even have a brand but heavily rely on channel operation are plunging into the market; consumers are more tolerant toward products with a better quality-to-price ratio.

Facing the relentless pressure from new players, most established brands, on one hand, are unable to quickly follow market trends and achieve agile responses from R&D to market launch; on the other hand, due to quality standards and cost controls, it is difficult for them to truly engage in the fierce price wars, thus significantly reducing the speed and survival rate of new product launches.

As the owner of such a mature brand in tea market, our client, however, is able to innovate successfully while maintaining its stronghold, because strategy wise it could identify a definite path to successful product creation, and boasts abundant reservoir of creative ideas in R&D end, and constantly crafts consumer-centric product concepts, which enables its NPD success across all channels. 

This actionable innovation solution, supported by Illuminera, directly addresses the pain points of innovation and can help calculate to enhance the odds of success. It is poised to assist similar large FMCG brands in a fiercely competitive market with limited budgets and R&D constraints , to boost the success and survival rate of new products, and ignite the market opportunities.

Leveraging keen insights into integrated data and a solid understanding of business, combined with the profound research into interest based e-commerce in recent years, Illuminera's big data consulting team, algo, launched an upgraded solution of its "New Product Strategy Map" to help brands seize forward-looking market opportunities, not blindly follow the trendy products, and to use big data to "calculate" market opportunities.

Compared with "consumer-product" as the center for NPD mapping in the past, the algo team has innovated the methodology and integrated the content related data into the updated solution to support brands to unlock new consumption scenarios.

By segmenting consumption scenarios reflected by content in social media, and combining the product layout of the brand itself, the brand can select potential scenarios from the opportunities presented.

Brands can further explore the product characteristics in the potential scenario, combining the online sales performance, and find guidance to a more forward-looking opportunity track.

Different from the previous methodology which mined opportunities from e-commence trends centered on target consumers, the updated New Product Strategy Map focusing on social media is able to form an effective connection with the marketing side in the process of future new product launch.

Take the case of our client, the sugar-free tea leader, as an example. Algo, the Illuminera boutique, had first created new ideas and concepts around user's demands under the new consumption scenario drilled from social media, then with comprehensive consideration of its capabilities in product, supply chain, R&D, channel, etc., assisted the brand to formulate its new product strategy for the upcoming 1-2 years. It was a breakthrough for those categories with limitation of long R&D cycle, and had achieved an innovative innovation process.

In general, the entire innovation cycle of mature brands is at least half a year, or more than 2 to 3 years. When it takes a long time, it still can’t guarantee the survival after launch.

Thus, the algo team has designed a system of New Product Bank tailored for beverage industry, easily clarifying the key attributes as well as high-potential raw materials of the category, and riding on the early market opportunities through automated trend tracking.

The New Product Bank system can comprehensively scan the market opportunities, accelerate the new product ideas, and measure the market potential of various creative combination through the intelligent recommendation. The same logic can be applied to other leading mature companies in the FMCG industry.

With strategy and product creativity in place, the last step before the launch of new products is a product concept that can captures attention with a “once-in-a-lifetime” impact.

With years of experience in integrating big and small data for product innovation, the algo team has been able to assist brands to develop new products through C2M co-creation, identify memorable product positioning, to capture the consumer’s mind.

A series of methodologies and mechanism were used in this project, including new product creative exploration, new product concept workshop, conceptual visual design, and potential assessment of new product, and they had finally resulted in the successful launch of the new products in sugar-free tea, broadening the category boundary for our long-term served brand.

The food and beverage industry, as part of the FMCG sector, stands at the forefront of the innovation wave, fighting to grow amidst market challenges, and each new product launch may be a "narrow escape after disaster". Over the years, Illuminera has continuously accumulated innovative strategic thinking and project experience, planning the "perfect path" from 0 to 1 for the brand, integrated big and small data to help new products break through the survival period, and unlocking the brand's exclusive "innovation magic".

Email us for more information

alice.he@illiminera.com

theresa.ye@illiminera.com

marketing@illiminera.com